1. Field of the Invention
The field of invention relates generally to a computerized architecture for facilitating work management.
2. Description of the Related Art
Authorization ensures that the paying party has sufficient credit to cover the cost of the event. Before and during the event, settlement is not important. Since the authorization must be completed before the transaction can proceed, latency is critical, as is the availability of the system. Authorization may involve a reservation element. An example of an authorization without reservation would be ‘has the customer bought unlimited access to music downloads for this month’, and authorization/reservation examples include credit card style authorization and requests such as ‘confirm and reserve that the customer has the funds for a 100 MByte content download’.
A system for meeting the requirements of relationship-centric authorization is detailed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/682,601 (System and Method for Work Management, Clubb et al., filed Oct. 9, 2003) and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/682,663 (System and Method for Revenue and Authorization Management, Clubb et al., filed Oct. 9, 2003) which are hereby incorporated by reference. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/151,930 (System and Method for a Functional Extensibility Framework, Clubb et al., filed Jun. 14, 2005) is also incorporated by reference.
Features of the various embodiments of these systems may promote functionality, availability, and throughput for authorization processing by logically partitioning key servers and/or independently partitioning a balance associated with a group of consumers across the set of logical servers associated therewith, and/or independently logically partitioning the data storage (data storage may include but is not limited to merely relational databases). It should also be noted that the functionality of the system may be easily applied to more than just authorization processing but should also include pure transactions, usage based transactions, reservations, permission checking . . . virtually any application with a high volume of throughput and may be applied to a number of industries including, but not limited to telecommunications, transport, retail and banking.
The current invention may preferably integrate with the systems described in the aforementioned patent applications, may be integrated into other systems, or may stand on its own.
A computerized system comprises one or more computers/processors in communication with one another that are programmed to ensure that the paying party has sufficient credit to cover the cost of the event and to provide reconciliation or other downstream processing of data produced by processing the event. This may be particularly relevant to telecommunications events but may be used in an ASP model or for use of functionality at kiosks. Some non-limiting definitions of terms used in this document follow.
A computer/processor is a device that accepts information (in the form of digitalized data) and manipulates it for some result based on a program or sequence of instructions on how the data is to be processed. Complex computers also include the means for storing data (including the program, which is also a form of data) for some necessary duration. A program may be invariable and built into the computer (and called logic circuitry as it is on microprocessors) or different programs may be provided to the computer (loaded into its storage and then started by an administrator or user).
A computer readable medium includes the gamut from disks, CDs, memory, or any storage that a computer may be capable of assimilating. Computer executable instructions include programs, routines, modules, and scripts.
An architecture comprises, in information technology, especially computers and more recently networks, both the process and the outcome of thinking out and specifying the overall structure, logical components, and the logical interrelationships of a computer, its operating system, a network, or other conception. Computer architecture can be divided into five fundamental components: input/output, storage, communication, control, and processing. In practice, each of these components (sometimes called subsystems) is sometimes said to have an architecture, so, as usual, context contributes to usage and meaning.
A router may be a device or, in some cases, software in a computer, that determines the next point (i.e., on a network) to which a unit of data (i.e., a packet) should be forwarded toward its destination. A router may be often included as part of a network switch, however a router may also have application specific functionality if it may be unable to determine the destination of the request from the network address alone (unlike a conventional IP router appliance). A router generally functions on the paradigm of single input and single output.
A multiplexer as used in this application refers to a computerized system capable of receiving single/multiple inputs and producing multiple outputs for further distribution to one or more other systems.
An application program interface (API) is the specific method prescribed by a computer operating system or by an application program by which a programmer writing an application program can make requests of the operating system or another application.
A consumer identifier comprises any type of identification (name, customer number, social security number, telephone number, credit card number, employer identification number, group ID, etc.) that may be encoded in a record or request for further processing (including routing where such router depends on the identity of the owner of the request). A consumer identifier may also include namespace. In general, a namespace uniquely identifies a set of names so that there is no ambiguity when objects having different origins but the same names are mixed together. As an example, in the Extensible Markup Language (XML), an XML namespace is a collection of element type and attribute names. These element types and attribute names are uniquely identified by the name of the unique XML namespace of which they are a part. In an XML document, any element type or attribute name can thus have a two-part name consisting of the name of its namespace and then its local (functional) name. In XML, a namespace is commonly given the name of a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)—such as a Web site's address—both because the namespace may be associated with the site or page of that URI (for example, a company name) and because a URI is conveniently likely to be a unique name. Note that the URI is not necessarily intended to be used other than as a name nor is there any namespace document or XML schema that must be accessed; the URI is simply used as a name (and part of the two-part name of any element type or attribute name so that the names are unique within the document).
A request/event may include authorization requests wherein a consumer may be requesting permission to use or perform a certain task (i.e., make a phone call, play a video game, access a file, utilize a machine such as a dorm washing machine with this functionality built into its interface, etc.). Often authorization will revolve around the credit-worthiness of the consumer, the amount of money available in a particular account, or a specific level of permission granted to that consumer. Requests may also include processing transactions and other customer service functions.
An authorization request may also involve a reservation element. A request may also comprise an event (which may be referred to as a termination event, accounting event, or charge capture in different industries) that may be a historical record of a transaction that may have incurred a charge and has to be recorded. Examples of such events would be phone calls, toll usage, downloads. Events do not have to be chargeable and may be recorded for informational purposes (e.g. 1-800 calls, 911 calls).
Programming means include any computer techniques/tools/languages/methodologies that are available to those of skill in the art.
A tag is a generic term for a computerized language element descriptor which may comprise a sequence of characters or other symbols which describe the document's logical structure (e.g., XML, SGML, HTML).
A plurality may be taken to mean two or more in a preferred embodiment, however, embodiments which describe a plurality may also be understood to function with only one of said component.
A server may be a computer program or even a thread that provides services to other computer programs in the same or other computers. The computer that a server program runs in may be also frequently referred to as a server (though it may contain a number of server and client programs).
A logical partition, as used in this application, may be the division of any of a computer system's work, processes, and storage into multiple sets of resources so that each set of resources can be operated independently. Requests for a number of logical partitions may be processed by an application (with one or more child threads or processes, with a number of associated application caches) that may be responsible for undertaking the processing on behalf of a number of logical partitions where the logical partitioning per application can be changed at runtime. While it is anticipated that each logical partition may have a dedicated process, by allowing multiple logical processing partitions to be dynamically assigned to a process allows consolidation of the number of network, cache, and I/O resources needed to allow the system to be divided into a large number of logical partitions to give fine grained control of the system processing. Each partition can communicate with the other partitions as if the other partition may be in a separate machine.